414 



OUR ARCTIC PEOVINCE. 



five thousand last season, and vice versa. It is impossible to locate 

 the best single spots for trade ; the catch in different sections will 

 vary every winter according to the depth of snow, the severity of 

 climate, the prevalence of forest fires, or starvation of whole vil- 

 lages, owing to unwonted absence of fish, and so on. 



In midsummer the Yukon is reached by small, light-draft, stern- 

 wheel steamers, which, watching their opportunity, run down from 

 St. Michael's and enter its mouth, towing behind them a string of 

 five or six large wooden boats which are each laden with several 

 tons of merchandise. The scream of their whistles and puffing of 

 these little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against 



Trader's Steamer towing Bateaux laden with Goods up the Yukon. 

 \The Kvichpakjust below Mercier^s Station.} 



a rapid current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely 

 solitudes of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area 

 of watery waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and 

 few in number, that even this innovation must be watched for every 

 year with a hawk's eye, or it will pass unobserved. 



The waters of the Kvichpak are discharged into Bering Sea 

 through a labyrinth of blind, misleading channels, sloughs, and 

 swamps, which extend for more than one hundred miles up until 

 they unite near Chatinak with the main channel of that great river. 

 This enormous deltoid mouth of the Yukon is a most mournful and 

 depressing prospect. The country itself is scarcely above the level 

 of tides, and covered with a monotonous cloak of scrubby willows 

 and rank sedges. It is water, water here, there, and everywhere 



